Car bombing attacks in Baghdad, Mosul as four US soldiers killed

Published December 4th, 2004 - 19:21 GMT

Two car blasts - at least one of them driven by a suicide attacker - took place next to an Iraqi police station just outside Baghdad's Green Zone on S

Two car blasts - at least one of them driven by a suicide attacker - took place next to an Iraqi police station just outside Baghdad's Green Zone on Saturday, killing seven people and injuring about 60.

Meanwhile, two Amercian troops were killed by roadside bombs in Baghdad and north of the capital Saturday, and two other Americans died in a suicide car bombings of their post near the Jordanian border the day before, the U.S. military declared.

Saturday's car bombs in Baghdad went off nearly simultaneously at about 9:30 a.m. by a police station across the street from a checkpoint leading to the heavily fortified Green Zone.

Health officials said the bodies of seven people killed by the blast and 59 wounded were brought to two Baghdad hospitals. Most of the victims were police officers the AP reported.

In an eastern district of Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed an American soldier and wounded five others Saturday, the military said. Another bomb near the town of Ghalabiyah, west of the city of Baqouba, north of Baghdad, hit a truck in a U.S. military convoy, killing a soldier and wounding another, Master Sgt. Robert Powell said.

A suicide car bomb hit an American forward operating base near Iraq's border with Jordan on Friday, killing two U.S. service members, the U.S. command said Saturday.

Iraq closed its Karameh border crossing into Jordan until further notice, Jordanian officials said Saturday.

Police in the northern city of Samarra also came under attack Saturday. Mortars were fired at a station after midnight, injuring two officers. Gunmen injured two policemen in another attack at about 10 a.m., according to police Maj. Sadoon Ahmed Matroud.

Elsewhere, a suicide car bomber detonated his vehicle alongside a bus carrying Kurdish peshmerga militiamen in the northern city of Mosul, killing at least seven and injuring eight, a Kurdish official said.

The blast went off in the afternoon in an eastern neighborhood of Mosul as the bus carrying militiamen loyal to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan were arriving from Irbil province, said Saadi Ahmed, a PUK official, according to the <i>AP</I>.